“I speak for this river carrying the stillborn, the dying —
this water that quenches the thirst of bosque, mergansers,
warblers, and ash-throated flycatchers.”
At Deceleration, we’re big fans of poetry that connects people to the land, to the air, to the spirits of our deeply intertwined families, this dance of being. Yes, to winding rivers, memory, and loss, as well.
Though we are only newly acquainted with the poetry of self-described activist and author Renny Golden, we happily recommend these stories of water, human labor, and the serpentine relationships that wend them together. Lyrical shelters such as Golden will construct during her reading at Incarnate Word University provide a natural space for environmental justice allies to rest and recharge and prepare to be stirred again back into the fluidity of their own forms of land defense.
“Her rivers are urgent witnesses,” Sandra Cisneros writes as praise to Golden’s work. “Her rivers sing truths, shimmer in the darkness. Here are songs pure as water to nourish and cleanse us in the season of lies.”
Renny Golden Benefit Book Signing & Presentation
Hosted by Headwaters at Incarnate Word and Visitation House Ministries
3:30 PM – 5 PM
Sunday, March 8, 2020
Christus Heritage Hall at The Village at Incarnate Word
4707 Broadway Street
San Antonio, TX 78209
Or maybe we just like that her recurrent character is a child named Wolf.
As Patrick T. Reardon writes for Third Coast Review:
In “They Named Me Wolf,” the boy looks forward to the day when he will become a man and do the things that men do, such as digging a link so the Rio Grande’s “star-flecked waters” will flow into irrigation channels.
Like Wolf, Renny Golden speaks for this river and all the other rivers where those pushed to the margins of US society find homes and work.
Even more, she speaks for those marginalized people—the Native Americans like Wolf, the immigrants from Mexico (with and without documents), and, along the rivers of her hometown Chicago, the Irish and African-Americans and Latinos and the blue-collar workers whose days are rivers of toil and endurance.
The Facebook event page promises us “Autographed book donations for a worthy cause.” Not knowing which cause, we assume from reading Golden, it will be one we can support.
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